Our primary distribution channel is NuGet with three packages:
See the "Building and testing" section in the developer guide for instructions on building Noda Time from source.
From release 1.1 onwards, there are two builds of Noda Time: the desktop version and the Portable Class Library version.
The desktop version requires .NET 3.5 (client profile). This build also supports Mono, with some caveats.
The PCL build is configured to support:
The PCL build also appears to work with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android apps, but that is implicit in the set of configured targets. This has not been extensively tested, although we do not particularly expect to see significantly different issues in Xamarin applications to those seen under Mono in general.
Noda Time does not support XBox 360 or Silverlight 3, and it's unlikely that we'd ever want to introduce support for these. (It's more likely that over time, we'll drop support for Silverlight - but not imminently, of course.) See the limitations page for differences between the PCL build and the desktop build.
The NodaTime.Serialization.JsonNet assembly is built and tested against Json.NET version 4.5.11. It's likely that any version of Json.NET from 4.5.0 onwards will work with Noda Time, but we'd recommend using at least 4.5.11. As far as we know, there have been no breaking changes in Json.NET after that which affect Noda Time, but semantic versioning rules suggest that it would at least be possible for later major versions to cause issues. If you discover any such problem, please report it to the Noda Time mailing list.
Everything you need to use Noda Time is contained in the NodaTime package. The NodaTime.Testing package is designed
for testing code which uses Noda Time. See the testing guide for more information. It is expected
that production code will only refer to the NodaTime.dll assembly, and that's all that's required at execution time.
This assembly includes the TZDB database as an embedded resource.
For Json.NET serialization, the NodaTime.Serialization.JsonNet package (containing a single assembly of the same name) is required, as well as an appropriate version of Json.NET itself. There is a NuGet dependency from NodaTime.Serialization.JsonNet to the newtonsoft.json package, so if you're using NuGet you just need to refer to NodaTime.Serialization.JsonNet and an appropriate version of Json.NET will be installed automatically. See the serialization guide for more information on using Noda Time with Json.NET.
Everything within the NodaTime assembly is in the NodaTime namespace or a "child" namespace. After adding a reference to
the main assembly (either directly via the file system or with NuGet) and including an appropriate using directive, you should
be able to start using Noda Time immediately, with no further effort.
As of version 1.1, the source code of Noda Time is published to SymbolSource. You can configure Visual Studio to automatically fetch the source code if you need to step into it when debugging your application. It takes a little bit of setup, but there are full instructions on the SymbolSource web site. (The instructions aren't specific to Noda Time, so if you're already using SymbolSource as one of your symbol servers, you just need to make sure you're not excluding Noda Time from the list of modules to fetch.)
If you believe you've found a bug in Noda Time, using the SymbolSource version is likely to prove painful after a while - it's much better to just fetch the source code and build your own copy locally.